August 24, 2004

The German Hyperbrachycephals

According to the Nordicist school, European achievement is primarily due to the tall, blond, dolichocephalic race. The only problem with this theory, which achieved such popularity in the 19th and early 20th centuries, is that when the skulls of prominent Europeans and Germans were measured there was no evidence of an overrepresentation of dolichocephals among them: indeed, most of them were brachycephalic, many of them tending to the extreme hyperbrachycephalic form, as the following passage illustrates.

One can imagine the shock an intelligent German reader suffered when he remembered that many of the great German heroes from Bismarck down to Hindenburg and Hitler were brachycephalics and even hyperbrachycephalics, and that the three greatest philosophers Germany has produced-Leibniz, Kant, and Schopenhauer-had round heads in the most extreme form (Fig. 2, No. 4, Leibniz, skull index 90.3[!]; NO. 5, Kant, skull index 88.5; No. 6, Schopenhauer, head index 90.0 [!).

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